Look, I know this Notus.org article (“It’s 2024. Elon Musk Rules X. And the political world is still addicted.”) is just trying to pile up the hate-reads.
I fell for it. I should know better. But it fell for it.
The reporting doesn’t even support their lede.
🧵
Their evidence for “the hellsite is back” is:
(1) political campaigns still advertise there. Democratic campaigns spent a million on ads in the past year. (Aka, during the entire primary season.)
(2) some pundits, operatives, and journalists still use the site.
(3) threads hasn’t replaced it.
In 2022, the total spent on digital political ads was ~$9 BILLION.
The vast majority of that was on Google and Facebook. Twitter has always been a minor player.
$1 million of aggregate ad spending is not a lot.
It means some consultants said “let’s toss a few bucks at X and see what happens.”
Then they interview a bunch of Democratic operatives, pundits, and writers.
And all of them say some variant of “yeah this place has declined. It’s a zombie site. But no other site has filled the gap yet, so I’m still puttering around here.”
That’s not much of a “Twitter is back!” story.
It is absolutely true that nothing — not Threads, not Bluesky, not Mastodon — is anywhere close to the scale/velocity of Peak Twitter.
But I don’t think there was a single serious analyst who thought there would be just yet.
(Bluesky has the juice. But it also has less than 6 million users.)
X is a lumbering husk, full of Nazis and crypto spam and AI pornbots.
Political insiders still use the lumbering husk because they’re basically hermit crabs. They’ll stay in that shell until there’s a bigger and better one.
There’s a perfectly good article to be written about how threads, in particular, hasn’t captured old-Twitter’s niche.
And the political insiders still lumbering around on X are decent evidence for that point.
But it isn’t an outrageous or click-baity headline.
There's also a good story to be written about how Twitter was never what people thought Twitter was. It's always been populated by niches, never achieving close to the reach of FB, YouTube, or IG - it's just that one of the big niches was politicos and journalists.
It’s like the feverish reporting when something “happens” on cable news that *everyone* (ie everyone they know) in Washington is talking about but not a single normal person outside the echo chamber has heard about or cares about.
